'One of his biographers said that [he] was one of us. And so he was. He was a boy who heard the train whistle in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track. How American. He was a grocer's son who got ahead by working harder and longer than everyone else. How American.'

Walt Whitman: 1865

'O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won...'

Frank Oz: July 2, 1990

'...he appreciated the performances and design of a puppet. He appreciated the art objects that he might buy. He appreciated the detail in a Persian rug. He appreciated...just beauty.'

Fidel Castro: October 18, 1967

'...the comrade who fought beside us, who was not born in this land, who was a man of profound ideas, who was a man who dreamt of struggle in other parts of the continent - and yet that altruism, to risk his life constantly.'

Friedrich Engels: March 17, 1883

'On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep-but forever.'

Edward M. Kennedy: June 8, 1968

'[he] need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.'

Madonna: 1997

'I'm going to miss you, [name]. We're all going to miss you. But I've got a pocketful of memories in my [Brand name] jeans, and they're not going anywhere.'

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, April 8, 2005

'To the Lord's question, 'Karol, do you love me?,' the Archbishop of Krakow answered from the depths of his heart: 'Lord you know everything; you know that I love you.''

Noboru Takeshіta: February 24, 1989

'the late emperor ardently wished for world peace and the well-being of the people, and devoted himself to these ideals.'

Charles Spencer: September 6, 1997

'I stand before you today the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a world in shock.'

King Hussein of Jordan: November 6, 1995

'I never thought that the moment would come like this, when I would grieve the loss of a brother, a colleague and a friend, a man, a soldier who met us on the opposite side of a divide, whom we respected as he respected us...'

Robert F. Kennedy: April 5, 1968

''I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that [name] was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.'

Ossie Davis: February 25, 1965

'Here - at this final hour, in this quiet place - Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes, extinguished now and gone forever. For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought...'

Maxim Gorky: 1924

'[he] is dead. But those to whom he bequeathed his wisdom and his will are living. They are alive and working more successfully than anyone on Earth has ever worked before.'

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: September 25, 1977

'We too, like the disciples of Jesus, have been stunned by the death of another man in his thirties. A young man dedicated to the pursuit of justice and reconciliation...'

Winston Churchill: November, 1940

'Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that [he] acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged.

Senator Lister Hill of Alabama: June 5, 1968

'Although she was denied the light of day, [she] cast more of the radiance of heaven than any person on this earth. Within this radiance and the light and example of her life, may we carry on in our troubled world, worthy of her deeds, her hope, and her faith...'

Ernst Straus: May 22, 1955

'His greatest sorrow was that, as he would say, 'I'll have to bite the dust before finding our whether this theory is the right one.' I do not believe he ever seriously entertained the thought that there might be no such perfect theory as the one he was seeking...'

Jawaharlal Nehru: February 2, 1948

' Great men and eminent men have monuments in bronze and marble set up for them, but this man of divine fire managed in his lifetime to become enshrined in millions and millions of hearts so that all of us became somewhat of the stuff that he was made of...'

Dragutin Plasc: May 4, 1980

'Nothing and nobody will stop us on the path of socialist self-management and non-alignment, freedom and independence. Comrade [name], from your way, we swear never to stray'